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Physiomics narrows losses despite sliding revenues

19-02-2018 09:26

Computational biology services provider Physiomics saw revenue drop 57% to £74,000 over the six months leading to 31 December, but the Oxford-based firm believed that a resurgence of interest in rational drug design was just around the corner.
Despite seeing revenue fall throughout the half, Physiomics shrank its operating loss to £220,000 from the £263,000 posted a year earlier.

Physiomics pointed out that as oncology pipelines had increased 45% over the last decade, pushing global spend on oncology drugs to $113bn as of 2016, with a 6-9% expansion on that figure every year until 2022, it felt there would be an increased acceptance of the value of modelling the effects of oncology treatments rather than "falling back on more traditional, often heuristic, methods."

The company's Virtual Tumour platform was designed to aid clients in making predictions on the efficacy of combinations of new and old cancer drugs in both pre-clinical and clinical settings, and is also capable of incorporating data from biomarkers to allow predictions to be made for patient subpopulations, making it well positioned to take advantage of the improving trends.

Physiomics, which also won new contracts with two major pharmaceutical clients in January and February, said first-half performance was in line with management expectations given the significant resource that was expended to complete its deal with Merck KGaA, and given that the revenue flows from the aforementioned deal didn't begin until January.